Some questions on Spaceships

[Rysith]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Yeah, that's not a missile, it's a drone. And it probably doesn't want to be closing at overly high speed, that limits engagement time and (greatly) increases the damage done by the impactors.

Frankly, it's not clear why it's a drone rather than a armed cutter with boarding parties. If you wanted to disable the ship mostly intact, presumably the next step is boarding, ideally conducted as quickly as possible after the disabling.

I'd think that you would want a drone because you're concerned about the ability of your target to shoot it down. It's a lot easier to throw a bunch of drones at a ship and hope one of them gets through, and then demand that the now-crippled ship receive boarders or be destroyed than it is to throw a bunch of boarding parties at a ship and hope that one of them gets through.

But that seems like the answer to what FeiLin was asking - if you want complex missiles, build them as drones and use 'hangars' to launch them rather than weapon systems. Given that a 16cm missile only masses 1/10 of a ton you'd need to scale a lot of the systems down to SM-1, but that means that the cost might actually compare favorably with the $100K a normal missile costs. As a GM I might even both allow you to launch them out of weapon systems as a special option and give a cost discount for 'single use' - I'm sure that there are all sorts of corners you can cut if you expect an operational lifetime measured in hours at best.